Understanding Email Tracking & Web Spiders

Understanding Email Tracking

Email-tracking programs allow the sender of an email to know whether the recipient reads, forwards, modifies, or deletes an email. Most email-tracking programs work by appending a domain name to the email address, such as readnotify.com. A single-pixel graphic file that isn't noticeable to the recipient is attached to the email. Then, when an action is performed on the email, this graphic file connects back to the server and notifies the sender of the action.

Hacking Tool

Visualware's eMailTrackerPro (www.emailtrackerpro.com/) and MailTracking (http://mailtracking.com/) are tools that allow an ethical hacker to track email messages. When you use these tools to send an email, forward an email, reply to an email, or modify an email, the resulting actions and tracks of the original email are logged. The sender is notified of all actions performed on the tracked email by an automatically generated email.

Understanding Web Spiders

Spammers and anyone else interested in collecting email addresses from the Internet can use web spiders. A web spider combs websites collecting certain information such as email addresses. The web spider uses syntax such as the @ symbol to locate email addresses and then copies them into a list. These addresses are then added to a database and may be used later to send unsolicited emails.

Web spiders can be used to locate all kinds of information on the Internet. A hacker can use a web spider to automate the information-gathering process. A method to prevent web spidering of your website is to put the robots.txt file in the root of your website with a listing of directories that you want to protect from crawling.